How Storytelling Can Boost Your Marketing and Sales

Marketing and advertisements often use stories to convey the message of their brand and showcase products in practical use. To create a strong storytelling culture, you first need to attract and further entertain your audience, in this case, educators. The best promotions and marketing advertisements are ones that entertain.

Second, you need to inform educators about your company message or product message. Why should they buy your product? Can they see themselves using your product in good conscience?

Finally, you want your viewers to place themselves as the hero of the story you are telling. No matter your product, the audience needs to be engaged.

Identify

Your brand identity is the core of who your company is and what they represent. When you have an audience, they should be able to see things that convey who and what your company is, as well as the products it’s selling. Defining this identity can take a bit of tact, but it’s an important aspect in delivering an authentic brand that will build trust and loyalty within the market.

If thoughtfully developed, your brand will be the outermost layer of what is deep within your organization. Educators will then experience your brand and be able to effectively communicate your institution’s core values.

Engaging your organization

Before your products can be brought to an audience, your company and those who work for you need to believe in the products they produce. Provide your story internally and gather feedback from those involved. This will create a lot of excitement and further engage professionals in becoming involved either within the company or the community through volunteer work.

Phases of evolution

As a company grows, it can often lose sight of what once was important. By utilizing these steps of evolution, you can retain what is most important to your company as you continue to expand.

1. Listen. It’s always good to get a second pair of eyes on something. You may think you know everything inside and out, but having a fresh perspective can often open new possibilities.
2. Learn and involve others. Engaging others and continuing to learn can only benefit your company. Employees that are stimulated and excited to work are happier and strive to make an impact within the company.
3. Adapt. Not everything is going to go as planned. Make sure you and your company can adapt to changes and still come out on top.
4. Share. Share the knowledge and share ideas.
5. Repeat. Don’t let yourself get stuck in a corner. Continue to progress and evolve over time.

Building a storytelling culture

To properly build a storytelling culture, you need to become a good storyteller by creating a story that can showcase who you are as a professional and what your company strives to do. But most importantly, you need to know who you are and what you own before you can even begin to tell others.

You have to be able to not only immerse yourself in the story you intend to create but ensure that the audience will be immersed in the experience as well. Last, you need to evolve as a person while your company continues to progress. It not only makes you as a business owner seem genuine, but it holds a lot of weight when you are finally able to share the story.

How to tell a story

1. When diving into a story, you want people to emotionally connect and invest in what they are immersing themselves in. Utilize content that will provoke an emotional response from consumers.
2. Marketing content should always aim to be positive in nature. People want to feel inspired by your products and the company, which will make them want to buy.
3. Audiences like to care about their products, which will often cause them to act. Advertising and promotional content should leave consumers with positive feelings.
4. While niche audiences always yield positive gains, diversifying your audience is a great way to appeal to a larger set of consumers.
5. Be inclusive. The educators and consumers vying for your products want to know that they are your focus.
6. Don’t forget about the consumer. Your consumers want to feel like they are your focus, not corporate gain.
7. Sometimes it’s important to take risks. It can lead to innovative results and even new products.
8. As speculated, emotional response is imperative to get people to buy. Spend more time on your products and the people buying them, and you might get people to spend more.
9. Educators love it when companies speak to them about their products. Certain tools that educators have always needed, but never knew how to replicate, until your product.
10. Don’t talk down to your consumers. Utilize constructive and disruptive conversational techniques to make an impact.
11. Finally, your message should be clear and concise.

MMS Education can help you identify your competitive advantages, analyze your data, and conduct customer research to learn why and how customers value your product compared to those of your competitors. Call us today at 866-382-6116 or fill out this form to see how MMS Education can help you.